“When you say radical right in America, people think Ku Klux Klan. They think of something violent, racist.” Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, lights a cigarette and looks straight at me. “This makes no sense at all. We are democratic … We are in the center.” With her straight-cut Italian suit, white shirt, and vintage necklace, the ash-blonde Le Pen looks more like Katie Couric than your stereotypical white supremacist. “If anything,” she says, “I’m to the left of Obama.” She cocks her head and smiles at me, gauging the effect of her audacious and deliberately misleading comparison.

It is a rainy Monday, and Le Pen and I are sipping coffee in her office on the second floor of the National Front’s bunker-style headquarters, near Paris. The daughter and political heir of the infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, may have inherited a taste for provocation from her father. But whereas his dramatic pronouncements have tended to confirm his reputation as a far-right extremist, hers are meant to rebrand the National Front as a mainstream party.

Jean-Marie was happy to merely play the role of election spoiler. Marine, who took over leadership of the National Front from him in 2011, is playing for actual political power. Since winning 18 percent of the vote in last year’s presidential election (a record for the party), she has experienced a meteoric rise in the polls. Her goal? To turn the National Front into France’s leading opposition party, supplanting Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Union for a Popular Movement, which lost the presidency to François Hollande of the Socialist Party last year. To that end, she has her troops running aggressively in the municipal elections that will be held nationwide in March. “Our political presence locally is the foundation of our ascent to power,” she tells me, pounding on her desk. Having spent months recruiting and training grassroots candidates, the party is poised to snap up hundreds of city-council seats and the mayoralties of a few symbolic big cities. Beyond that, Le Pen is taking steps to be a serious presidential challenger in 2017.

But first, she has had quite a heavy legacy to shake off. For more than four decades, her father has made a name for himself with xenophobic and anti-Semitic slurs, claiming, among other niceties, that gas chambers were merely “a detail in the history of World War II.” Over the past two years, Marine has given the oft-demonized National Front a drastic makeover, or “dédiabolisation.” (Jean-Marie is commonly referred to in the French press as le diable—“the devil”—while Marine has from time to time been called la fille du diable.) She has purged the party of old-school diehards, barred skinheads in Nazi garb from rallies, promoted respectable young technocrats to management positions, and tamed its rhetoric. In 2011, she publicly condemned the Holocaust.

Throughout, Marine has been the party’s single best selling point. Jean-Marie Le Pen was easy to hate; his daughter is hard not to like. With her talk of the price of pizza and school supplies, the twice-divorced mother of three could be the woman next door. Born in 1968, she is in step with her generation on a range of issues. Whereas Jean-Marie was anti-abortion, socially conservative, and a staunch advocate of small government, Marine is pro-choice, gay-friendly, and economically interventionist, with a populist streak. Her down-to-earth persona has gone far in helping her win over previously hostile parts of the electorate. Nearly one in five women voted for her last year, as did almost a quarter of 18-to-24-year-olds—unprecedented numbers for the party. In a recent survey that asked voters whom they would select if presidential elections were held that week, she placed second, after Sarkozy but ahead of Hollande.

Have nationalism and xenophobia become more socially acceptable in France because of Marine Le Pen, or vice versa?

And yet, Marine Le Pen’s agenda remains deeply nationalistic and xenophobic. Among the policy proposals she has adapted from her father’s are drastic limits on immigration, a prompt exit from the euro zone, and what she euphemistically calls “national priority,” a set of discriminatory measures against non-nationals. To this list, she has added some ideas of her own, such as impelling legal residents who’ve been unemployed for at least six months to return to their country of origin, regardless of their ties in France. In a country beset by high unemployment, rising anti–European Union sentiment, and unrelenting multicultural tensions, these measures have struck a chord with the public. They have also been instrumental to Le Pen’s efforts to cast herself as the last champion of French democracy—which in her telling is under attack from without by the “European Soviet Union” and from within by a “massive” influx of Muslim immigrants.

Meanwhile, in the political vacuum left by last year’s election—Hollande’s approval ratings are abysmal; the Union for a Popular Movement has yet to come up with a credible successor to Sarkozy—many mainstream conservatives have turned sharply to the right. Some have even taken Le Pen’s pet issues (immigration, Islam, illegal Roma encampments) to such extremes that Le Pen has begun to sound tame in comparison. In July, a right-wing mayor allegedly muttered that “perhaps Hitler did not kill enough” Gypsies. (The mayor says he was misheard.)

All of which raises a question: Have nationalism and xenophobia become more socially acceptable in France because of Marine Le Pen, or vice versa? Certainly, her repackaging of the National Front’s trademark anti-immigration stance as a lofty crusade to uphold France’s secular democracy has been adroit. Jean-Marie’s remarks about the Holocaust drew media attention, but always backfired; when Marine castigates Muslims’ street prayers, she scores political points. “It’s okay to be Islamophobic in France these days,” says Michel Winock, a French political historian. The spread of radical Islam, the jihadist-inspired terrorist attacks in Toulouse in March 2012, the head-scarf controversy, and Sarkozy’s own vocal anti-immigration stance have all propelled rising, if irrational, fears of a Muslim takeover. According to Winock, “Islam now represents the enemy, when it used to be the Jews for Daddy’s radical right.”

Dédiabolisation aside, Marine is still overwhelmingly her father’s daughter. When I visit her again several months later (more coffee, more rain, same stark office), I pull out a photo I recently came across, of her at age 6. A curly-haired tomboy in bell-bottom jeans, she is sitting on Jean-Marie’s lap. “I was always clinging to him,” she says, gazing at the picture fondly. “The party was born when I was 4. It grew up with me, and me with it.” Her devotion to the Front—and to her dad—were further cemented by childhood trauma. One morning when she was 8, Marine awoke to an acrid stench. Smoke hung in the air, and shards of glass and plaster were scattered around her bed. Someone had blasted open the family’s home with dynamite, in an attempt to kill her father. No one was seriously hurt, but the experience permanently shaped her worldview, fueling a narrative of persecution in which she is under assault by hostile forces. “Politics for me started in violence,” she says. Violence, she is quick to add, “against me.”

As I cross the National Front’s courtyard on my way out, I pass a bronze statue of the party’s patron saint, Jeanne d’Arc, the virgin martyr who died fending off invading British soldiers during the Hundred Years War. Marine named her first daughter Jehanne, in homage, and each May 1—Labor Day, in France—she lays a wreath of flowers at the feet of the fully armored Maid of Orléans statue at the Place des Pyramides, in the First Arrondissement. None-too-subtly identifying herself with the medieval warrior, Marine told a crowd last year that just as she had been criticized for wearing jeans, “Jeanne d’Arc was frowned upon for her masculine attire.”

A few days later, I visit Jean-Marie Le Pen at his home, the same gated mansion overlooking the Seine in which Marine grew up. “Marine will be president of France, maybe as soon as the next election,” he announces confidently, before taking a more apocalyptic tone. “It makes me very nervous, because they won’t let us have power unless it’s a very serious crisis … It will be us or death.” He pauses, and then abruptly grins. “But France has had providential wake-up calls in the past.” I ask for an example.

“Jeanne d’Arc,” he replies, without skipping a beat. “She came at a time when France seemed about to disappear.”

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.